[linguae]

Depending on the system this could range from an easy project that one can do in a few hours to a very long quest. For some research systems (particularly those implemented in the pre-FOSS era or those from companies) it may be impossible to try out the systems without attempting to implement them yourself. However, there are other systems that are available to try out. The ideal situation is a FOSS release, like the MIT CADR Lisp machine code and Interlisp-D. Barring that, the next best thing is some type of freeware or non-commercial license; I think this is the case for OpenVMS, though I could be mistaken. Some systems cannot be obtained easily without traveling the high seas, if you catch my drift, matey (cough Open Genera cough).

I think a lot of value can be gained from not only using software, but by reading papers and manuals, especially when the software is unavailable or unattainable. There’s a site called Bitsavers that is a treasure trove of old documents.

Come to think of it, a significant reason for Unix’s dominance in research and education is its availability, going all the way back to the 1970s when Bell Labs sold licenses to universities at very low prices. Even when licensing became more restrictive in the 1980s, this spurred the development of MINIX, GNU, later BSDs, and finally the Linux kernel, in order to recreate the environment students enjoyed with 1970s Unix. This openness is a far cry from the work of Xerox and Lisp machine vendors, where one needed to have been privileged enough to work for one of these vendors or their customers to use these environments, which were far more expensive than Unix workstations and especially personal computers. Thankfully there’s a wealth of documentation about these non-Unix systems, as well as testimony from their users. In addition, some systems were open sourced. But we must remember the times that these systems emerged, and we must remember why Unix became so dominant in the first place; its openness and availability set it apart from its competitors.